On Bad Endings

Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. “War and Peace,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Suitable Boy”), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before. This is true not just of good novels but also of books on which the reputation of Western fiction rests. The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re going to faint. The scene where David, having been rescued by his Aunt Betsey and fed, given a bath, and put to bed, looks out the window at the moonlight on the Channel, imagining that he might see his dead mother there, with her baby in her arms (she died in childbirth): after I have forgotten most of the events of my life, I will remember that. But in the last chapters of the novel, the now-adult David marries a wise woman and succeeds in life, and from then on you die of boredom. Ditto “Wuthering Heights.” After the scalding passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, who cares about the amorous back-and-forths of their uninteresting children? Yet this occupies half of the book.

Willa Cather’s “Song of the Lark” is a similar case. The novel shows us how Thea, a girl from a dusty little town in Colorado, becomes a great a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Cather, like Dickens, felt that her young person’s apotheosis was a wonderful thing and needed describing. It didn’t. All the characters do in the final chapters is talk, talk, talk. Even when Thea accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who adores her, the transaction is clipped and dry. Cather eventually saw the problem, and when, more than twenty years after the book was published, she revised it, hacking off a lot of material, she included a preface explaining what she had done. “The chief fault of the book,” she writes, “is that it describes a descending curve; the life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented young girl ‘fighting her way,’ as we say. Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful.” She did not add that this was true of her life as well—that in the early period there was a great love and a great struggle, and in the later years, when she was famous, there was a correcting of galleys and punctual mealtimes. She repeatedly quoted the famous words of Jules Michelet: “Le but n’est rien. Le chemin, c’est tout.” (“Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.”)

But the novel with the most shockingly bad ending is our country’s greatest novel, “Huckleberry Finn.” Here, after Huck and Jim’s revelatory journey down the river—a trip that seems to tell you everything important about America and is also a love story, in which a black man and a white boy become each other’s truest friends—Huck accidentally meets up with his old pal Tom Sawyer at Tom’s aunt’s house. While the whole point of going up the river was to release Jim from slavery, he now gets imprisoned as a runaway. Tom, the soul of amoral mischief, has good ideas about how he and Huck can tease and frighten Jim in the hut that is his holding pen. Huck agrees. One day, they go to the hut, and Tom asks Jim if he has any spiders in there:

“Yes—easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting a person that pets them. Any book will tell you that…. Why, you can get him so in a little while that he’ll love you; and sleep with you; and won’t stay away from you for a minute; and will let you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth.”

Everybody comes out pretty much O.K. (Jim is freed from slavery), but it’s hard not to have a bad taste in your mouth as you close the book. How could Twain, so serious, morally, in the earlier part of the novel, have veered off into this cruel comedy? Bernard DeVoto, though he revered Twain, still wrote that in the history of English-language fiction there was “no more abrupt or more chilling descent.” Some critics, great ones, tried to defend the ending on formal grounds. T. S. Eliot wrote that Twain had to bring Huck back to where he started out: in a comic world, ruled by Tom. Lionel Trilling, with misgivings, said something similar. Leo Marx scolded both of them for this. As he saw it, we just have to admit that Twain had a “failure of nerve,” and backed off from what he had said, in the main body of the book, about race and morals. I believe that’s the best explanation. But what’s most interesting here is that readers can consider a book very, very great even when it has a fault as huge as this. We seem to be able to eat the good half of the apple and throw the mushy part away. The last time I read “Wuthering Heights” I was shocked by the lameness of the second half. I had forgotten it.

E. M. Forster, in “Aspects of the Novel,” said that nearly every novel’s ending is a letdown. “This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually the characters go dead while he is at work.” That’s still not much of an explanation, though. Why do novelists feel that they have to round things off? Is it some basic conservatism? Or classicism?

Another possibility is that the author just gets tired. I review a lot of books, many of them non-fiction. Again and again, the last chapters are hasty and dull. “I’ve worked hard enough,” the author seems to be saying. “My advance wasn’t much. I already have the idea for my next book. Get me out of here.”

But even that reasoning, so attractively commonsensical, is inadequate. I think the tiredness may not be personal, but something about the universe in general: biology, physics. Art, whether fiction or not, is a challenge to entropy, a bumping up of something that must be flattened down again. When you think about it, it’s surprising that art is allowed to exist. It’s always a deviation: overly selective, overly concrete, and unfaithful, not to our actual experience but to our generalizing afterthoughts, the thoughts that get us through life. In “War and Peace,” when the excitable young heroine grows up and has kids and gets fat, young readers may be disappointed, but I think that adults may be comforted. Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again.

Illustration by Maximilian Bode.

Joan Acocella has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. She served as the magazine’s dance critic from 1998 to 2019. She is the author of, most recently, “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints.”

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